


Un Vampire se déplace dans l'espace et le temps (A Vampire Moves In Space and Time)

by Cephalopod



Category: Interview With the Vampire (1994)
Genre: Far Future, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephalopod/pseuds/Cephalopod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new world holds an old vampire; Lestat and Louis chase a grim rumor through the far-flung planetary colony of La Plus-Nouvelle Orléans and find a marvel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Un Vampire se déplace dans l'espace et le temps (A Vampire Moves In Space and Time)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clarita_Black](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clarita_Black/gifts).



La Plus-Nouvelle Orléans was a beautiful city at night. She was a beautiful city at all times, but at night when the clouds rose she bloomed into a flower of wet light. The rain-shedding spikes of her buildings rose in a visual trick of arithmetic perspective to tickle at the underside of the galaxy's edge where it bisected the dark of the sky. It seemed a boundary, of sorts. A height mortal power could not surpass. A streak of warm golden cream that sparkled with the red flecks of far stars racing toward their ends.

Lestat pointed up at the sky, clapped an overly-amiable hand across Louis's back as they stood on the rock-paved embankment of the Grand Canal. "There," he said. "It was there. Look for the faintest flicker of light, too subtle for human eyes; there."

Louis knew he was lying. Earth had been a dead memory before he'd ever endured mortal birth, it had gone down into the sun when it burgeoned. And if it had been there still, if there had been anything to reflect the stale rays of that reddened sun here to the surface of La Jeunesse as it spun around a different star, they would be too faint even for the eyes of vampires to see. And Lestat always pointed somewhere different. Lestat had no clearer idea where Earth had been than Louis did, for all that Lestat had breathed and eaten there.

"It was everywhere, apparently." Louis goaded him, without rancor. "Your world."

"It was," said Lestat, untroubled as ever by his own inconsistency. "It still is."

Louis's family had been farmers of rice and brahmi. Bad luck and bad choices had pulled them away from the swamps just south in Laforche his forebears had claimed, and Louis had himself lost the last of their holdings. Lestat never asked for the details of Louis's own bad choices: the woman he'd hoped to marry, the man she'd chosen instead and the duel Louis called for afterward, and so on. He'd lost the duel, lost his sense, and despite his injuries nearly killed the man. She had spurned the both of them in disgust for it, and taken his good name with her when she left the colony. Sales fell through, the rice fermented in the paddy, and the brahmi choked in shade-loving algae as Louis neglected everything but his melancholy.

Lestat had come to him as he wandered the streets and the pontooned canal barges where many people before him had found an end to the lives that troubled them. It had been quick; efficient. It had not been a choice. He'd tried to tell Lestat about what had happened before they met more than once. Lestat would interrupt him with a laugh or a brusque, theatrical gesture--he would go so far, Louis found, as to wrap a hand marble-white and marble-cold over Louis's mouth if he persisted.

"Hush now," he would say. "That was a different time. That was another Louis. Forget him, and be the Louis you are now." There was something odd to the way he said Louis, something in his accent Louis supposed came from Earth.

It had been four years ago, and little in those four years had given Louis reason, all things considered, to regret. His qualms had faded as Lestat said they would. His tastes turned from guilty swallows off little scuttling grèbles toward humans, and what was there for it but to find in the finite population of Plus-Nouvelle a source of lives treated cheaply? They lived well on indentured astronauts and the itinerant engineers that sloshed from settlement to settlement with the supercargo transports.

Time passed, pleasantly enough. Harmlessly, for them. Lestat, as he was keen to remind Louis, had been a hellion in what he called his youth. His time on Earth, he meant. Here, he said, it became obvious to him that a change of pace and a companion would do him a world of good. He'd lived long and seen many things and in this, the smallest of the old colonies, he was retiring--he snickered when he said this--yes, retiring to the country. He wrote, occasionally, in the set of shuttered dockside rooms they shared. They hunted together.

Lestat found the taste of the citizenry lacking; not salty enough. And true it was that the freshwater oceans and silicate soil of La Jeunesse failed to match the oceans of Earth which all humans still contained some small part of. There were supplements, for citizens. New arrivals tasted better, Lestat said, but the whole planet had the taste of a boiled trout.

Louis had never seen a trout, he said. Lestat told him to be in no great hurry to remedy that. He spat into the street, spotting a brick with a red-flecked smear. Insipid things, he said. It had been ages since he'd taken real game.

"You took me," Louis pointed out, a little piqued.

"Yes, well," Lestat told him with a chuckle and a squeeze of the shoulder. "You're different, aren't you?"

Two years ago the first stories had trickled out. They sounded like sorceries. There were cries at night from a particular building in the engineering quarter nearest the Canal Loire, cries in voices people knew. Of people long dead. No words in them; shrieks and moans only, their timbre weirdly sensual.

But people missing due to some cause other than them was no great shame. For two years Louis and Lestat hunted in the shadows of that district. The old town--unkindly nicknamed Moins Nouveau, Least New--had been built with the metals of the starship that brought La Jeunesse its new burden of life. Those metals had been alloyed to withstand the airless, radiation-heavy halls of space. The atmosphere had not been kind to them. Dressed in bricks made of the new clay before supply ships could bring more suitable materials, the skeletons of the old buildings labored and shifted in their unease. Vagrants huddled urgently around the base of one in particular, a plant that produced export chemicals. Of what sort, no one seemed to know. They were easy hunting. Distracted, they were. Whatever the building was to them, it gave their thoughts and their blood a complicated spice.

Mon frère, one would say, ear pressed to the brick. Everyone's brother, another would say, with a laugh and a jerk of the hips. Word spread quickly. On the heels of those stories, more. Those who climbed the building without falling and blinked through fogged windows, they came back with stories of prisoners writhing in cloudy columns of light. It was impossibly lurid. It was impossible not to hear about these things, these bogeymen.

Lestat, who had seen much and suffered Louis no doubt about what he considered important, did not consider these matters important. "Superstition," he scoffed. These people needed no more superstition. He—and here he amended himself—we can provide all the superstition they require.

Nonetheless, Louis wondered.

He was content to do no more than wonder for a time, but early one night when a porter came to their rooms with a delivery, he invited the man in. There was a whisper in the man's thoughts. Just a taste of Moins Nouveau and a fear more pointed than most that suggested a connection. And there was, sure enough, as the porter sat and drank ricebrew while Louis palmed a cup and watched him, making agreeable noises and careful to blink when he should. The story came tumbling out with the scantest of prompting.

His son, the porter confessed. Just four years old, dead of something no one knew until it was over, and he had heard that piping voice as he hurried past the plant. He'd denied it for months, but his route took him past that building several times a week and if it was a haunting, it was a haunting of a place to which his son had never been. Louis watched something like anger color the porter's face more darkly, and felt his own mouth water. Why would he imagine it, the man demanded. Why would he imagine that voice, there? What father would put his child in such a place, even in his own mind? His features fell into a slack, weary despondency and he set down the cup to hide his head in his hands. Louis set upon him then. It was pleasurable, as it always was, but his heart wasn't in it. He swallowed the last mouthful of the porter's life and slumped into his chair to let the body lie boneless over the table. His head spun with the fumes of the alcohol and an old ache of shame stoked back to life.

He told himself it was an act of mercy. Briefly he did that, at any rate. The grit of the lie in that stood him up and set him pacing while the corpse cooled, combing restlessly over his own thoughts. Sure enough that he had lost his own pride and property, sure enough he'd lost himself in despair and that was why Lestat had seized upon him, but...this man had endured his loss. He'd lost something he'd had, rather than something he wanted, and until Louis had ended his life...he’d worked and carried on and hauled his heavy chain toward heaven still.

Louis had abandoned everything his family had labored for and his own human life for less than that. That stung him more sharply than he expected. Lestat would laugh at him, he thought, laugh at even the suggestion that he'd done it to spare the man the burden of continuing. But Lestat had gone out, fopping around in the theaters or some such thing in the manner he habitually assumed, and Louis was alone with these thoughts for a time.

And when Lestat came through the front door, cheek warm and eyes bright, Louis held up a hand to stop him.

"Mondieu," Lestat said, raising his hands and shaking his head in an amused, exaggerated pantomime of being taken aback. "Careless tonight, are we?"

The porter's feet slid further under the table and his head lolled as Louis kicked the leg of his chair. "He deserved it."

"My dear Louis," sighed Lestat, sweeping forward with a long-suffering laugh to embrace him. "Why should either of us give it a moment's thought if he deserved it or not? Evildoers and saints alike have their savor, and that savor is the highest justice a human can know. I doubt he was either one. Was he to your taste, that's the question."

Louis pulled free. He kicked the chair. The corpse tilted with it, then slipped uncomplainingly to the floor where it lay loosely huddled near Louis's feet. Blank grey eyes half-closed in a faded brown face seemed to study Lestat.

"He told me something; I want to go to the plant. The one with the voices."

He'd heard the echoing, strained voice of his son in the porter's thoughts. He hardly knew what he wanted there, or wanted to find. Or rather he did know, and was shamed past examining it clearly enough to explain.

Lestat made a mocking hitch of his eyebrows and a lewd smirk down at the dead face pressed against the floor. He turned in a swirl of blue cloth and opened the window to admit some of the starlight outside. The water between the docks sparkled and cast weird shadows across the ceiling. "A child?" he asked, eyes flickering. “I hardly expected you to be interested in such things.”

"His child." A gesture toward the floor. Louis wondered what else Lestat could hear from him.

"And what, exactly, do you want to do with this child? Take him in? Make him one of us? Form a happy family, perhaps, to replace the one you disgraced?" Lestat perched against the windowsill, arms folded. Louis, hard as he tried, could read nothing on that supercilious stone face or in the stone mind behind it.

He pushed a hand through his tight black curls and shook his head, a few quick steps putting the rest of the room between him and his maker. "I want to meet him. To tell him his father was a good man, I don't know...I want to meet him, that's all."

"Oh, but you don't," said Lestat, his voice a smug purr that Louis knew well. "You've grown practical in your old age, haven't you? So like a vampire. I'm proud of you."

"Four years a vampire is hardly old age, Lestat."

"Psch," Lestat scoffed with a wave of his hand. "Four, four thousand, it's all a matter of one's point of view. You're older than you know, Louis, that's the important thing."

"I know exactly how old I am, which is more than I can say for y-"

"-and you want to make sure this innocent soul does not exist, one way or another, because you are ashamed and you understand nothing and want no remnant of it to haunt you. Oh, Louis."

Damn Lestat.

"You bastard," he sighed, knowing how little it meant. Lestat's father and mother, whatever their relation, were pairs of drifting cinders in solar wind. He kicked at the floor, suspecting how petulant he looked. Lestat tipped his head toward him and smiled that patronizing, indulgent smile.

“And of course we'll see to it. Tonight. Why not? Why shouldn't we?”

Louis cast a rueful look at the corpse on the floor. “Him first.”

"Of course," said Lestat, still not shifting from the window. "I suppose we'll need to bury him. Or to burn him." His easy, mocking smile slid into something horrible when he said that.

Louis swallowed, a nervous human reflex. His mouth still tasted faintly of the porter's tired blood. "The swamp," he said. It was close, and it was easy. The little root-tending fish did the worst of the work for them, and crops grew the better for it. They'd sunk bodies there before; it was hardly even a question that needed to be asked. Why did Lestat's eyes blaze like that as Louis gouged a hand into the man's belly, to ensure he sank and stayed, and as Lestat helped to wind him in a sheet?

They carried him out--you saw nothing, he heard from the minds of passers-by as an echo from Lestat--and slid him into the water teeming with things that loved what salt there was in a corpse. The Grand Canal met the Canal Loire some distance to the east, and from there it was a moment to the plant. This late, there were nearly no supplicants. A few clung, though, as though feeding on it. None paid them any mind as they approached; absorbed in their own thoughts or warned away, the effect was the same. There was a front door in the brick. A thick iron thing, domed outward like the hull of a spacecraft it had been. There was still the remnant of a welded signature on one seam, a worn-down worm of solder in the grime that vampire eyes revealed. Lestat ran his fingers over it lovingly.

Louis tugged at the handle. “You knew him, didn't you? The shipwright who made that?”

“Her.” A fingernail tickled around the outer curve of a G. “Elle faisait du bon travail...but no. Are you truly planning to go in the front door? How mortal of you. Part of your charm, I suppose.”

Louis let his hand drop, embarrassed. The walls were sheer brick, unbeautiful and unornamented; there were no windows until the clerestories through the peaks of the roofline.

“Louis…” A hand brushed his cheek, then tapped his shoulder expectantly. He turned, and Lestat was not there.

“It seems as though I need to remind you, from time to time,” came Lestat’s voice from several feet above him. He’d walked up the wall, easy as blinking. “that you are, in fact, a vampire. That lingering respect for mortal life you go on about doesn’t mean you need to lead one.”

He didn’t go on about mortal life, did he? He was sure that he didn’t. It hadn’t come up in years, not since he’d discarded his reluctance to feed on humans.

“Live on rats,” Lestat sighed, his eyes on the stars above, “and you scuttle like one. Come here, Louis.”

He’d never tasted a rat, either, or seen one in the flesh. La Jeunesse had no rats at all. Shaking his head, he reached up to take Lestat’s hand and they rose up to the roof light as breath.

One of the windows was broken already, and in they went. It was as easy as that. They descended to the floor and stood between rows and rows of lambent fluid-filled columns, lit gold from below in the otherwise dark room, large as a cavern. In each column, a still human shape. It was sepulchral, yes, but nowhere near as unsettling as the stories had suggested. There were no cries, no moans, no sounds of pain or pleasure or anything at all. A faint whirring. The soft sound of moving fluid. That was all.

Louis closed his eyes and listened with his mind’s ear, as hard as he could, for the voice the porter had showed him. To his side, Lestat was saying something in a low, hissing voice. He ignored it. It was never easy to ignore Lestat; he managed only a few seconds of silence before the voice of Lestat’s mind rolled with careless enormity over his insistent EXPLAIN THIS. He had not heard the boy. He wasn’t here. None of these floating figures had a mind he could touch; they were, as well as he could tell, simply dead. Against a background of Lestat’s unease, he felt himself relax. The sting of guilt left by the porter faded. He opened his eyes again.

What were these dead shells used for? He had no idea. Export chemicals, apparently. Who knew what the engineering districts did, other than engineer. He had been a farmer and needed no export chemicals, and Lestat….well, Lestat likely knew no more about such things than he did.

“It’s a laboratory, Lestat,” he said, drifting down one of the rows. “Bodies, fluid, artificial light. Nothing more.”

“It can’t hurt you,” he added as an afterthought, more snidely than he meant. He wondered where that thought had come from--Lestat snarled at him for it, but he wasn’t sure that thought had been his own before it came out of his mouth.

He trailed a hand over the smooth, curved glass as he passed them, thinking of wineglasses. The corpses in the golden cylinders were preserved by something, still smooth and with bulges only in the places living bodies had them. They floated, nude, their eyes closed and hair drifting. The bases hummed from time to time and a soft current would stir loosely curled fingers. He wondered that it bothered Lestat so much. His maker trailed behind him pacing and glaring. He’d seen water burials--nearly everyone in La Plus-Nouvelle went down into the ocean at the end, a hole in their bellies and weighted something heavy to carry to heaven before they could lay it down for good. Louis had choked awake out of the same nightmares every other child had, of little fish and twisting weeds and columns of bubbles rising to the surface. His devout childhood mind had kept itself awake by imagining every detail of sacred gates built of those last burdens. Heavy wet bricks to build it and chains to keep it shut and lead keys to open it, all of it draped with the green blisters of hyacinths. Lestat knew none of that. He feared neither water as a human nor sun as a vampire of uncountable age. Why was he so disturbed?

He stopped in front of one and stared up at the slow twist of black curls around a tiny dark face, round-cheeked. A little girl. She was beautiful, he thought. The fluid surrounding her was opalescent, a warm golden cream sparkling with red flecks.

There was a soft chime from the metal base of her cylinder. Her fluid stirred--Louis’s vampire eyes could make out the flutter of her little eyelashes in the current. Huge black eyes opened, of a sudden, and Louis nearly stumbled back.

QU’ELLE SONT CES CONNERIES, demanded Lestat in a silent roar, and Louis nearly broke into a laugh at the inelegance of it despite his surprise.

“This is insane,” he spat, shoving Louis aside to circle the cylinder. He smacked a hand against it, careless, and a web of sparkling cracks sprouted from that place. “Humans. You’ve gone mad, all of you. Is this science? Is this progress?”

Louis put both hands on the glass and looked up at the girl again. She was looking down at him; it was impossible to say whether she was looking at him, or at anything at all.

“Read her thoughts, Louis,” Lestat commanded, wheeling to pace again in a swirl of blue coat.

“I can’t,” he said, a little cross. “It’s something the water’s done, Lestat, there’s nothing there. She’s just a corpse, same as she was.”

“Read her thoughts,” Lestat repeated, and Louis was taken aback by the force of his tone. He reached out again for the mind in that little body, eyes searching her face.

Mamma, it said. She blinked. Her chest rose and fell, and her eyes focused on him.

“My god,” he breathed.

“You see? You see?” Lestat struck the tank again. A trickle started. “She’s not the only one among this corps embouteillée. Dead minds thinking again, feeling again--that is blasphemy, Louis. Blasphemy! The dead stay dead!”

“You said that we were a blasphemy! And to be proud of it!”

“Shut up, Louis. The dead don’t rise again, everyone knows that. They don’t. Except through us--vampires alone, we are the keepers of the gates of death and its minders and this, this is…” Lestat’s soliloquy trailed off into muttered French punctuated with curses. Louis heard the name Claudia, repeated more than once.

“Non,” Lestat decided finally, a heel stamping at the floor with finality. “A faux vampire. A scientific vampire. No, we won’t have that.”

Fluid pushed more urgently between Louis’s fingers over the web of cracks in her glass. It smelled of the salt supplements humans needed on La Jeunesse, but pungent enough to make Louis’s eyes sting. “Lestat, stop! We can leave, right now.”

Lestat’s answer was a fist through her tank. There was a great rush of fluid and an awkward, ungainly crash of glass that toppled the girl out onto the floor, bleeding from many cuts. Louis dropped to cradle her as she gagged and cringed. “What are you doing?” he cried.

Lestat made no answer. He was fast, impossibly fast, and strong beyond measure; Louis felt that he had only blinked and in that time the floor was awash with saltwater and half-floating corpses. The lights in the cylinders shone on. WIthout the fluid to diffuse their light, the room was much darker. Distant sounds of alarms began almost as an afterthought. Louis tugged the girl closer as she coughed, opal fluid sloshing over his thighs as he knelt. “Mam-ma,” she coughed, wrapping weak arms around his shoulders. Blood, rich and salty, coursed over his arms.

From the next aisle the wet whoosh of Lestat’s boots through the water came closer. “Leave her,” he snapped. “We’re leaving. And it’s time we left this colony, Louis, time you saw the world-”

“Come here, Lestat,” he snapped. “She needs you first.”

“The hell she does.” He stood over them, swatting peevishly at the heavy coat hem clinging around his calves. “She’s an abomination. Let her die, properly, and we’ll be gone.”

She was cooling already against him, her little body paler and limp and her eyes glazing over into whatever new death waited for her. He curled a hand into her hair and stood with her, glaring. His eyes stung. “Help her,” he pleaded. “This doesn’t need to happen!”

“Doesn’t it?” The alarms were still ringing, and in the distance Louis felt the minds of gendarmes drawing nearer. Lestat sneered. “Want a family now, do you?” He spat. “What a touching change of heart. Do it yourself, if you like.”

“I don’t know how--Lestat, she’s dying!”

“Of course she is! She’s meant to be dead, you fool! Why couldn’t I have chosen someone with some sense?”

Louis fisted Lestat’s collar with a snarl. His hand was coated slickly with the girl’s blood. Lestat was as casually immovable as a statue, the same as always, but Louis saw his pupils spread.

“Give her here,” he said, his voice thick.

Louis was covered in her blood as he did so; Lestat’s eyes lingered on the abbatoir down his front before turning, almost lovingly, to the throat of the little girl as he took her. Her lips moved without speaking. Lestat pressed a finger to them, then pressed that finger to his own.

“Claudia,” he sighed reverently. “Ma cherie. Always some new trick.” He nuzzled past the hair matted over her throat and made quick work of the little blood she had left. The rest was quick; a gouge of his wrist, a brief thrashing, and once her death had quieted, she clung to Lestat like a kitten.

“I want more,” she whispered.

“Of course,” he told her, stroking her curls. “You always do. That’s better, my dear, isn’t it? Now that you're yourself again?”

“Is it done?” Louis demanded, but he could see the new shine of her dark eyes and the new gloss of her skin from where he stood.

“It’s done. Give our daughter your coat, Louis.”

He shucked the red mess of his jacket and folded it around her bare soft shoulders, around Lestat. The gendarmes had finally arrived--a herd of them poured through the door at the end of the room, and froze in place at the sight. Pools of liquid. Glass and metal, everywhere. Rafts of bodies, washed up against each other and onto each other as the tanks drained.

“We’re going.” Lestat began to walk.

Louis followed him, nearly losing his footing over the corpse--now a corpse truly--of a young man. “How? Are you going to kill all of them?”

Lestat laughed at that, a soft, indulgent chuckle. The girl squirmed in his arms, and he comforted her with a kiss to the forehead. “Claudia,” he whispered, “shh now. Are you trying to scare her, Louis?”

“Of course I’m not--Lestat, are you mad?” What an odd look Lestat’s face had, how distant. Some of the gendarmes were reaching for weapons as they drew closer--if Lestat wasn’t going to kill them, Louis realized, he very well might have to. There were a dozen of them, at the very least. How--

He walked past them. Directly past them. As one, they sheathed their weapons and stared with eyes like glass. Louis hurried past them on Lestat’s heels, grateful of the reprieve. Perhaps, Louis thought, when he was old enough to have outlived a planet, he’d be able to do the same trick.

“Where are we going, Lestat?” The sun was beginning to give the horizon its violet tint as they left the building, past the huddled shapes of a few penitents who still clustered waiting for the voices of those they’d lost. “We can’t just stay here, now, unless you can do what you did to the entire colony. You can’t do that...can you?”

Lestat didn’t even spare him a look in answer to that, only a soft sound of amusement. He was absorbed with the new vampire in his arms.

“We’ll need somewhere to stay. Some...some sort of documents. A ship. We should leave.” Louis was almost babbling, now; everything had happened so quickly--how had he become a father, suddenly, to a daughter Lestat spoke to in such a familiar way?

“Don’t ask, Louis,” chuckled Lestat.

“I didn’t ask a qu-”

“This happened...because it always happens.” A soft stroke of the girl’s cheek. The threat of the sun had already sent her to sleep. “Somehow you always come back to me, and so does she. Pay it no mind.”

“What?”

“To the port, then. Where are we headed? Somewhere new, I think. You choose.”

“I-”

“Anywhere, Louis. It doesn’t matter. Choose where you and she will do the inevitable.” Lestat strode along, a long few seconds passing as he shared a silent joke with himself. His shoulders hitched. “Ah, it's always your idea first, isn't it? Mondieu. Where shall we play this out? I’m going to give you the choice I never had.”


End file.
